Today in Conservative humor...or what passes for it

This is what writer’s block looks like, kids….

What began as a way to camouflage my inability to come up with ideas I found interesting enough to write about is becoming something on its way to take on a life of its own. I run across a lot of things I find humorous/interesting/just plain silly, but they’re things I can’t add anything meaningful to. When the jokes write themselves, anything I might do would just muddy the waters.

Conservatives as a rule aren’t funny, but they DO have a gift for self-parody, and for that I’m grateful. It makes my job so much easier.

With that in mind, I bring you what may (or may not) become a semi-regular feature. What follows is merely a sampling of Right-wing “humor”- much of it the self-inflicted variety.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) revealed on Thursday that he had become a congressman because he was outraged that single women were having as many as 15 babies and getting welfare checks.

“If it weren’t for the policies in this War on Poverty declared 50 years ago, it may well be that I would not have ever run for Congress,” Gohmert said during a Wednesday night speech on the House floor. “Because what got me thinking about it first as a state district judge back in Texas was seeing more and more young women, single women coming before me — single moms — charged with welfare fraud.”

Republicans have turned “War on Poverty” into “War on the Poor.” Few Conservatives have been so blunt about and proud of being a card-carrying member of the Congressional Republican (lack of) Compassion Caucus than Louie Gohmert. To his “credit,” he’s also a lifetime member of the Congressional Bat-shit Crazy Caucus. When Gohmert opens his mouth, I find myself half-expecting the soliloquy to devolve into a rumination on Jesus riding dinosaurs.

That Gohmert is even in Congress is less a statement about him (not that he’s worth his $174,000+ salary) than it is about the knuckle-dragging denizens of his east Texas district. I’ve spent a fair amount of time there, and I’m here to tell you that it’s one of the creepiest patches of real estate in a truly, deeply crazy state. Sometimes you can almost hear the banjo music….

The perennial candidate for public office and former host of the MSNBC show “Alan Keyes Is Making Sense” has been promoting a movement to elect officials who will vote to impeach the president, but it has so far failed to gain much traction.

“Many Americans are still adamantly unwilling to choke down the prospect of life under a vicious, dictatorial regime,” Keyes wrote in a World Net Daily column published Friday. “Their eyes see past the populist disguise of socialist gangsterism. Some have (I think prematurely) concluded that America’s liberty is irretrievable defunct.”

That’s where Jesus comes in.

“Others, particularly those who believe in Jesus Christ’s permanent resurrection of hope, look unflinchingly into the abyss, sure that if they remember and trust in God’s law of love and mercy, He has the power to restore their nation to the better path of human destiny,” Keyes wrote.

Wow. Just…wow. Talk about raising bat-shit crazy to a whole new level, eh?

I wonder if someone should tell Keyes that the object of his hatred was democratically elected? Twice, if memory serves. You don’t get to impeach a President simply because you lost an election. That’s just not the way American democracy works. You also don’t get to impeach a President because you don’t like his ideas. No, impeachment is reserved for “high crimes and misdemeanors”…you know, actual crimes? That would be things like propagandizing a country into a war based on lies and propaganda, killing 100,000+ Iraqis, and sending 5000+ young Americans home in flag-draped coffins. Never mind the untold thousands who came home wounded, maimed, or damaged.

THOSE are the sorts of things a President should be impeached for. Ah, but THAT President was a Republican, so he gets a free pass. A Democratic President can be impeached for the sole reason that he’s not Republican.

If you’re advocating for the impeachment of a democratically-elected President AND claiming that Jesus is on your side…well, don’tcha think it’s time you saw your doctor to have your medication adjusted? The delusions of grandeur and relevance are really becoming rather tiresome.

All Gregory Beck wanted to do was honor the 26 victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre the best way he knew how: by giving out ammunition to the gun-nuts he knew for 26 days straight. But you people can’t tolerate a sense of humor in a school board member, can you?

Peck resigned as a member of the Brookfield, Conn., Board of Education Tuesday, after enduring two public meetings in which dozens of residents demanded his ouster, according to the News Times of Danbury. All because of this:

The outcry against Beck stemmed from a Facebook post made after the Nov. 5 election that stated his “26 Acts of Kindness” tribute would be to deliver boxes of ammunition to his gun-enthusiast friends. Many people considered the post to be inappropriate and offensive, since the “26 Acts” movement had been dedicated to the victims of the Dec. 14, 2012, shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.

His exact quote was “i shall buy my friends who are gun enthusiasts a box of ammunition on days 1-26”, according to the Brookfield Patch.

Wow. It would be difficult to imagine a less intelligent, more inappropriate, or more cold-hearted and insensitive way to pour salt into the wounds of an entire community. It wasn’t enough that 26 innocents were massacred on 12.14.12 by a gun-toting mad man. Now this sorry excuse for humanity thinks it would be really kinda neat to commemorate the tragedy by handing out ammunition to his friends as “26 acts of kindness.”

It would be difficult to imagine a more tone-deaf, clueless, and heartless response to a tragedy of such magnitude. And Beck was probably patting himself on the back for being such a giving, thoughtful humanitarian.

We feel like we’ve been a bit remiss in sharing the good news about Representative Jack Kingston, one of the Georgia-bred shining stars of the U.S. Congress. Sure, we touched on the illustrious Kingston…when we chatted about how he liked to demand that federal employee wages be frozen while he rained fat stacks of taxpayer money on his own staffers, but we never really got into his deep and abiding awfulness from December when it came to demanding that children who are too poor to afford lunch should sweep the floors or some other menial task in order to feel appropriately humiliated enough for their poverty before being allowed to eat, because there’s — say it with us — “no such thing as a free lunch.”

I suppose the good thing about Kingston is that he’s committed to the idea that you shouldn’t get something for nothing…which seems like a good philosophy. Of course, it’s only good if that standard is applied universally, meaning that you adhere to the same standards you hold others- like poor children, f’rinstance- to.

Of course, if kids are poor, it’s really their lazy, shift parents who are to blame. After all, if they really wanted to lift themselves out of poverty, why wouldn’t they just borrow $35,000 from their own parents and start a business? THAT’S what made America great, not a gaggle of lazy ne’er-do-wells who refuse to do for themselves because they know the government will pay their way.

That Kingston has no intention of holding himself to this “no something for nothing” standard only speaks to his epic hypocrisy and total cluelessness about the the poor. Poverty is not some sort of treatable disease; it’s very often a self-perpetuating state with little if any chance of escape. Yet Kingston still insists on blaming the poor for their lot in life. I suppose that’s easy to do when your salary is in the six figures.

The National Organization for Marriage has increasingly focused its anti-equality advocacy on a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, a notion that has only lost traction over the course of its multiple failures to pass in Congress. On Thursday, the group posted a blog post designed to direct readers to sign a petition urging members of Congress to support the amendment by scaring them with threats of an impending 1984-style dystopia if the amendment doesn’t pass. The post seemed to have been deleted from the site, but has since been restored.

Reflecting on the Duck Dynasty scandal and the gay community’s negative reaction to Phil Robertson’s homophobic remarks, NOM imagines the following threats:

…Imagine that the situation didn’t involve a high-powered lobby and busy-body “thought police.” Imagine instead that Phil had been up against the full force of the government and the actual police.

…Imagine that it hadn’t been a network with the mere ability to hire and fire. Imagine instead that the man-in-charge was a federal judge, able to saddle Phil with criminal “hate-speech” charges, civil rights violations, and onerous fines.

…Imagine that it wasn’t just a Hollywood clique and cabal disapproving of a certain celebrity’s Christian values. Imagine instead a new State regime wherein those values were the legal and cultural equivalent of racism, and any citizen expressing those values was subject to punishment.

Imagine a world where NOM and its fellow travelers couldn’t make up nonexistent threats out of whole cloth.

Imagine that NOM wasn’t allowed to defend the hate speech of a bigoted, homophobic “Christian” as perfectly reasonable and appropriate.

Imagine if NOM couldn’t oppress and discriminate against those whose lifestyle they find to be “icky.”

Imagine if NOM wasn’t allowed to impose the values and prejudices on others they deem to be “less than” and unworthy of the rights and benefits that accrue to good, God-fearing, Conservative, heterosexual Christians.

Imagine if NOM realized their beliefs don’t make them superior beings, and that all the GLBT community wants is to be left alone to live life as they see fit.

Imagine if NOM realized that if their marriages are threatened by same-sex marriage, they might want to take a look at the state of their own relationships.